I just can't stop thinking about

I can’t stop thinking about [Redacted]. Even when I manage to distract myself, I notice I’m not thinking about her, and then my brain just snaps back to her again. It’s constant.

I know she’s going through a lot right now. Both of her grandmas are very sick. Her family is struggling. Her mum even lost her job because she’s been caring for her own mum. I understand that. I really do. I know [Redacted] has been under unbearable stress, and I know she didn’t have the capacity to take on my problems too.

But at the same time, I was in the worst mental state of my life.

Over the past few months, I was raped twice and then assaulted again by someone I knew. After that, I completely fell apart. I told [Redacted] and I told other people that I was not okay, that I was manic, in psychosis, not thinking clearly, and desperately needed help. I was behaving in reckless, self destructive ways.

I told her I was going to run away with some guy. I said we were breaking up. I told her how can I love her if i don't even want to be alive. Sent *** to someone. I even went on a website to try to sell my body because I was so disconnected from reality and from myself. None of this was planned or thought through it was driven by being seriously unwell.

One of those situations ended with me being assaulted again.

After that, I was completely off the rails and started prostituting myself. I didn’t feel like a person anymore. I kept saying I needed help. I needed inpatient care. I wasn’t safe in my own head.

And then [Redacted] left me.

I know she was hurt. I know what I did looks like betrayal. I know sleeping with other people and sending *** is devastating in a relationship. I’m not denying that. But I wasn’t acting out of malice or because I didn’t care about her I was in a psychiatric crisis and had just been traumatised multiple times.

Now I’m left trying to process all of it alone and the fact that the person I loved most is gone too.

I keep thinking, Why didn’t anyone intervene? Why wasn’t I sectioned? Why didn’t someone step in when it was obvious something was deeply wrong? I wasn’t refusing help I was begging for it, but I wasn’t being taken seriously.

Now I’m not manic or psychotic anymore. I’m just deeply depressed, grieving everything I lost, and wondering how it all fell apart so badly.

I don’t know how to hold both truths at once: that I hurt her, and that I was severely unwell and traumatised when it happened.

I just don’t know how to live with this.